She and Will had left Nottingham hoping to find something different, something permanent. Important. She thought they had found it at Locksley Castle, in the family there that was tighter than any gang. But the world was far bigger than they had realized, and it cared very little about their intentions within it.

But that was also their advantage. Away from the city, nobody was watching them.

Back in Nottingham they had grown to become the largest fish in the market, which meant every fool gord had his eye on them. But maintaining their secrecy out in the Sherwood was offensively easy. There was no city guard to march through their camp every day, no patrols to outsmart. And if the gord Jon Bassett had been frightened properly, the Nottingham Guard wasn’t like to come ambling about to make trouble any time soon. It was time to take everything they’d mastered with the Red Lions, and scale it up. Gambling, forced protections, organizations of slickpickers, there was no reason they couldn’t make it all work outside of a city.

But first the others would need to train at more than just archery. And Locksley’s easy answers had quickly made some of their group alarmingly docile. It was already more like running a troupe of actors than a gang. There were—admittedly—pieces of it that were fun, that she’d steal after Locksley left them. But cheap theatrics and charity could not keep them afloat for long. The real work was there for them to take—black market trades, smuggling, the like. Less fun and not as profitable, but it would sustain them in the long run. After their jovial little carriage heists petered out. After Locksley left.

It would be her turn, hers and Will’s, soon enough.

“Make way!” Will shouted and Elena turned to see that Much had been provided a bow and arrow, and a log to stand on. The log was critical, as the bottom of the bow reached lower than his toes.

“Whose idea was this?” she asked, slipping in to bite softly at Will’s neck.

He gasped. “It was his!”

Her hand wrapped around his waist and pulled him close. His breath sharpened. He couldn’t lie to her like this, she knew his every weakness.

“I swear, he begged me to use the longbow.”

“You shouldn’t let him embarrass himself,” she warned, her hand on his chest.

“He won’t embarrass himself,” he insisted. “I only gave him the bow. Yes!”

He clapped his hands hard, twisting away from her as Much started to line up his shot. He meant well, but Will was too eager to see Much grow into the same boy he had been himself. That was no surprise, of course. Much had thirty fathers and thirty mothers in this group, and each sought to remake him in their own image.